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Disable IPv6 in ESXi Kickstart without additional reboot

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ESXi supports dual stack networking (IPv4 and IPv6) by default, however users can also configure just IPv4 or IPv6, which requires a system reboot for the changes to go into effect.

Recently, I received a question from a colleague asking if there was a way to disable IPv6 during ESXi Kickstart (aka scripted installation) but NOT require an additional reboot as this setting is typically added in the %post or %firstboot section, which will require an additional reboot due to changing the networking stack default.

The solution was actually quite simple by just leveraging the %pre section, which would ensure that IPv6 is disabled upon the initial reboot after the ESXi installation.

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PowerCLI automation for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA (PAIF-N)

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With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1.1, customers can now take advantage of the new VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA (PAIF-N) solution, providing an optimized and validated platform by NVIDIA for running modern AL/ML workloads on VCF. To learn more about the PAIF-N solution for VCF, there is a comprehensive PAIF-N Guide that includes the full software build-of-materials (BOM) as well as a step-by-step implementation guide for deploying the solution.

If you are interested in exploring the new PAIF-N solution, I recently came to learn the PowerCLI team have created some really useful PowerCLI scripts which fully automates the deployment of PAIF-N and makes setting up the environment a breeze!

There are 4 PowerCLI scripts that is included in the PAIF-N automation:

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Quick Tip - clusterImageEnabled property required for JSON deployment in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1.1

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While updating and testing my Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Lab Deployment Script to support the latest VCF 5.1.1 release, I came across a strange error message in the Cloud Builder UI about uploading the personality to SDDC Manager:

Failed to upload personality to SDDC Manager Failed to upload personality to SDDC Manager


It turns out with VCF 5.1.1, when you deploy using JSON deployment method, you need to explicitly define the property clusterImageEnabled, which determines if the VCF Management Domain will be deployed using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (VLCM) image based versus the legacy vSphere Update Manager (VUM) baseline under the clusterSpec specification.

"clusterSpec":
{
    "clusterName": "vcf-m01-cl01",
    "vcenterName": "vcenter-1",
    "clusterEvcMode": "",
    "clusterImageEnabled": true
}

Once I included the property with the desired value, I no longer ran into the issue and for anyone who is automating using Cloud Builder API, this will be a handy to be aware of.